QC6 Day 8

This morning I spent some time sewing to complete a quilt row that I started putting together last night.  It is for the Virginia Row by Row Experience.  This is actually a national shop hop for quilters' as they travel around through the summer.  There are quilt shops in 34 states participating, and over 1250 quilt shops!  If you visit participating shops in person, you can pick up a free pattern for a row designed by that shop.  The theme is "seasons" so all the shops chose one of the 4 seasons for their design.  Many shops also offer kits for their row if you want to make yours just like theirs.  If you combine 8 rows into a finished quilt and are the first person to bring it to a participating shop, you can win 25 fat quarters of fabric.  Row by Row Experience is the national page from which you can access all the participating states and shops.

The row I am working on was designed by Artistic Artifacts.  Judy featured thermofax screens created by PGFiber2Art (that's me and Elizabeth!) and wooden printing blocks with strip piecing to create a contemporary spring row.  I followed her lead to create my own fabric featuring text screens ("art" and "stitch") on top of a gelatin plate printed background, and added a final layer of screen printed ferns.  The base fabric was hand dyed, so the whole piece was created from scratch beginning with white cotton.  (I shared the picture a few days ago but will show it again.)  This is the row that Judy designed.

Here is my hand-made fabric.

This is the row that I made using my fabric and pieces of batik for the strip piecing.  The darker strips between the rows is some of the "tree bark" fabric shown in yesterday's post.  That will also be used for the binding after the row is quilted.

I'm not planning to make a quilt with the rows I collect (at this point); so far I'm just thinking table runners.  We got the pattern from Keepsake Quilting (New Hampshire) last week, and will be visiting a few more shops tomorrow.

Basket Weave Strings

 On Day 3 of Celebration I shared some pictures of Bonnie Hunter's Basket Weave Strings class.  Since then, I've worked on making more blocks.

The process for this project is to work with your scrap strips, divided into 2 groups - color, and neutral.  According to Bonnie, neutral is anything the color value of a brown paper bag or lighter.  It can have print and pattern and color, as long as the background is neutral.  Another factor is the value of the fabric you put the neutral next to. The darker the value of the color, the darker the neutral can be, as long as there is enough contrast. 

These are my boxes of colors and neutrals.  The colors are primarily batiks, the neutrals are more of a mixture of batiks and other commercial fabrics.  But you can see there are actually light colors in with the neutrals, not just off-white or tan or beige.

The blocks are pieced on a paper foundation.  I used newsprint; Bonnie likes to use old phone book pages.  Cutting the foundations is the only measuring needed.  After that, pieces are trimmed to be a bit longer than the paper.  If they are too wide, they can be torn into narrower strips.  Its ok if they aren't straight; actually being a little wonky makes the blocks more interesting.

Here I am chain piecing 2 blocks.  You can find Bonnie's directions for making this quilt here.

 I shared this picture before, of the blocks I got done during class.

These are the ones I've done since, I think about at least 20 more, so total I should have 35-40.  It takes 98 squares for the quilt.  However,I think I might do something else with some of them first before I do a quilt, which means even more blocks, but I don't think I'll run out of scraps any time soon - stay tuned to see what I do!